Where are the children, Denver?

Looking for films to show during the Childrens' Rights Film Festival the Amnesty International chapter at our university intends to host next month, I came across a video produced by a group of young people in a Denver, Colorado program called Arts Street. The video, entitled "Where are the children, Denver?", is about the struggle of many young people to make it through their day, let alone to stay in school. It's about the hard core realities of family poverty and addiction. It's about going without food and being locked in closets and despairing of life. And it's about the pain of walking alone with no one to tell.

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to get very involved with a Truancy Task Force in Broward County/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where at that time, on any given day, 10,000 children would not be where they belonged -- in school. Multiple professionals, offices and agencies spent months compiling information and arm-wrestling issues only to find that many of those children were dealing with heart-breaking levels of abuse and neglect. We learned that racism (especially by teachers and administrators), fear of bullies, and plain old hard core depression haunted the schoolday experiences of hundreds of youth. And we learned that the attitudes of too many over-loaded, ill-prepared teachers and overworked, overwhelmed social workers was to try to hold the children responsible (somehow) for problems that were far to heavy for their young shoulders.

One California study found that every dollar spent on keeping kids in school reduces crime by FIVE TIMES the amount of every dollar spent to lock them up. But where do we put the bulk of our funding? Into locking them up, of course. I've said for years that, as far as I'm concerned, if you know how to change something and you choose not to do it, then you don't really want change.

A mentor, an adult who cares, who lights up when they see the young person, can literally make the difference between that youth staying alive and dying a little every day until they are, for all practical purposes, beyond the vale. I have seen a student come back from the brink of disaster on the basis of a sixty-minute encounter. And yet many adults, though busy they may be, are bored out of their minds for want of doing anything that brings real satisfaction.

Is that television program, that football game, that shopping trip, that hour with the newspaper so valuable to you that you can't EVER change it out for a few minutes with a kid who has no one? Are you sure? Why not try watching "Where are the children, Denver?" and asking yourself again?

Whiteness 101

I had an experience this week that was unexpected and, frankly, a little weird.

You know by now, I assume, that I teach sociology at a University and one of my courses this semester (which began this last Wednesday) is a course on Racial and Ethnic Relations. So far, so good, right? I mean, this is what I do, after all. And after twenty years of doing it, I know better by now than to ever think I'm not going to be thrown a curve every once in a while, especially when I've just changed schools. Besides, I'm a pro and I love what I do and periodic shake-ups keep us young (they tell me).

Anyway, my usual way to start my course in Race is to talk about how, according to scientists, "the socially-constructed, political notion of 'race'" is not biological. Then, I ask everyone to put themselves into a big circle in skin tone order (that's right). It isn't easy. They want to be compliant, but it's a request that immediately -- and even considerably -- raises the tension level in the room.

I keep up a stream of patter about the topic to keep us moving forward, bringing in "hair texture" as the next consideration.

"Do we place someone with darker skin and straighter hair BEFORE or AFTER someone with lighter skin and curlier hair?" I ask casually, as if we discuss such things in public all the time.

I don't actually expect them to answer. Nor do they.

Finally, I pull out some one dollar bills and bless each of the darkest five or six with one to keep, explaining that they're getting the money for having the darkest skin. The rest of the students, by now openly vulnerable, look disappointed.

"What's the matter?" I ask, pretending not to understand. "You don't like it when somebody is rewarded for an accident of birth over which they had no control? People that look like me receive far more benefits far more often than this."

Suffice it to say that it's a pretty effective exercise and a very dramatic way to begin the course, make my initial points, and get everybody outside their comfort zone where they will stay for pretty much the remainder of the semester.

The rest of the course is based largely on a process of showing very intense videos and requiring everyone to write out their reactions, which they turn in to me. Then, I pick and choose among them, reading aloud to the group sentences and paragraphs from different reactions (without identifying the writers other than by ethnicity). This gives the African-Americans, Asians, and Latin@s an opportunity to say exactly how they feel without having to worry about being personally attacked. It also gives the students who look like me an opportunity to hear it straight for once, in a setting where I can comment on and further contexualize what they are hearing. The White students can write exactly how they feel, as well, of course, but hearing it read back to them out loud and also contextualized helps them to reconsider their White Supremacist thinking.

So imagine my surprise and consternation Thursday when I walked into the classroom and saw 41 students, almost every one of which was European-American. I cringe to think of it yet.

I had no idea what to do. I had brought my dollar bills and the other things I needed for my usual opening volley. I was excited, though edgy about teaching race for the first time in Louisiana. But I was ready. And now, here I was, flying by the seat of my pants without a shred of warning and no do-overs. Whew!

We all lived through it, more or less, I suppose. I mean, some of the students had already had me for other classes and knew what to expect. In fact, some of them had taken this course expressly to see what I'd do in there. But even they couldn't make me more comfortable and help me through the glitch. I was dumb-struck. And, of course, when I'm nervous and free-falling and talking about race, things can get hairy for the listeners. (I'm smiling here, but I do know -- and I'm sure you can imagine -- I can get rough.)

Later, I went to a couple of former students, young people of color I trust, and asked them what they thought the lack of color among the students in that course is about. Talking with them, I came to realize that students of color in Louisiana have enough to deal with racially without volunteering to sit in a room twice a week listening to racist White folks defend their belief system. They couldn't possibly have imagined what I had in mind. So I got unintentionally hung out to dry.

To make matters worse, my department chair pointed out that while sociology majors at my institution are not required to take Racial and Ethnic Relations, criminal justice majors ARE. So, what I was looking at the other day was primarily a room full of southern European-American law enforcement professionals of the future. Oh, my.

(It didn't occur to me until this moment that the last three public universities I taught for all required that every undergraduate take at least two "multicultural" courses to graduate. Which gives me a really good idea...)

In the meantime, I'm going to have to draft a whole new game plan for this course in this semester. It'll look something like Whiteness 101, I guess.

What's Going On? Lies.

A few minutes ago, I came across this YouTube video posted by Carmen D. and I just had to pass it on. It hurts to think about how the photos and film clips of Vietnam could now be photos and film clips of the war du jour (is it Afghanistan, is it Iraq, is it -- God/dess forbid -- Iran?). How come? Because The Powers That Be tell lies.

I've posted this poem before, but it's been quite a while and it's one of my favorites.

~~Lies~~
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them that God's in his heaven
and all's well with the world is wrong.
The young know what you mean. The young are people.
Tell them the difficulties can't be counted,
and let them see not only what will be
but see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter
sorrow happens, hardship happens.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
it will repeat itself, increase,
and afterwards our pupils
will not forgive in us what we forgave.

Quote of the Week

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall

I've been teaching for nineteen years. In grad school, when I decided to go on for a Ph.D. (which has been very long in coming, as it turns out), I was asked if that meant that I wanted to teach.

"Oh, no!" I declared immediately. "I want to run something, preferably something international!"

The fact is that, at that point, I was beginning to talk with people from around the world about setting up an International Economic Exchange Organization -- a barter network for member nations to rival the world bank.

Then, one day, the professor I was charged with assisting asked me to take one of his classes for a couple of days while he was gone and the rest is history. What I discovered was a roomful of possibilities, a sea (or at least a pond) of life on the verge of spreading everywhere, life unfolding.

In nineteen years, as a direct result of being in constant contact with the vitality of people engaged in learning processes of all kinds, I have grown and changed in ways I could not have imagined in that now long distant classroom where I first spoke about gender and work. Many of the men and women I have taught and learned from and counseled and encouraged may have gained little more than a passing grasp of sociological principles, but there have been more than a goodly number whose lives, they have told me, changed radically under my tutelage. And from time to time, they come forward to remind me so.

Recently, I have been contacted by several who caused me to consider once again that there was a time I wanted to run something international, but I have consciously chosen instead to engage myself in opening up that world to other, often younger, souls with great heart and great energy. Angela in Paris, Samantha in China, and Marc in the blogosphere honor me. I have made a difference. I am changing the world. I stand grateful.

The Gates of Hell Book List

My last post was on the struggle of standing at the gates of hell where people--and most particularly young people--of all types, but most particularly young people of color are thrust by a society that does not appear to care that they are human and, in fact, seems hell bent, if you will, on seeing them founder there. Since I wrote that post, some books have come to mind that might be interesting to those who find themselves trying to be of service in such settings. They aren't many and I'll just list them here in hopes that readers will add other titles in the comment thread.

Failing Grades: How Schools Breed Frustration, Anger, and Violence, and How To Prevent It by H. Roy Kaplan

The Way it Spozed To Be by James Herndon

Understanding Black Adolescent Male Violence: Its Remediation and Prevention by Amos N. Wilson

A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court by William Ayer

These books are very different from each other and I'm making no claims for how they may or may not apply to a given situation. I have not included the (too) many books I have found inspirational or instructive that were just about poverty, the inner city, disenfranchised youth, and so forth, because the man for whom I wrote the original post on the gates of hell is already well involved in that setting and after thirteen years probably could write a book himself. But I got special and helpful input from each of the books above and look forward to seeing what you might add to the list.

The Gates of Hell

With six courses to teach (which means 14 times per week in the classroom) plus being the advisor to the Sociology Club plus trying to seal down a permanent position so I can pay my rent for the rest of my life plus helping to plan an 8-day trip to Mexico over spring break AND beginning to learn Spanish plus trying to think about getting things published, I consider it a special day when I get to read a few posts on somebody else's blog. I remember fondly going from blog to blog last summer for hours on end and writing two posts in one day, if I was so inclined.

More recently, I was reaching a point where I wondered what it would take to force me to the mat again. It's not that I don't have topics. I keep a running list of blockbuster ideas I deem worthy and even needful of addressing. And I still have "A European-American Sets Me Straight" to finish...eventually. But I'm rushed in the morning, whipped at night, and running from activity to activity even when I'm home on a Saturday and refuse to get out of my red plaid flannel pajamas. Reading preparation alone for six courses is pushing me into a new pair of glasses.

Then, I checked my emails yesterday and found that I had a new commentator on my latest post.

"Howdy from Oklahoma," he began.

"My wife and I are high school English teachers in urban Oklahoma City high schools. My school is 70% African-American...[and] has all the problems of urban schools. Our students are 90% free/reduced lunch. We have a negative school environment, poor discipline, high absenteeism, high drop out, poor attitude. I've been here 13 years. Recently, I read that black males who drop out of school are twice as likely to be unemployed or in prison than they are to have jobs. So I feel that I can't give in to despair and that I have a holy mission to be here. But I wish I felt more competent. I know how to survive in my school, but I worry that my teaching is ineffective. I'd be glad to get whatever help you can offer me. Thanks, Lynn Green"

And just like that, I'm here. Nodding. Captured like a fly between the window and the screen. Mesmerized by his paragraph like a frog staring at a bonfire, instinctually realizing on some level that no rational person would make even the most well intended attempt to reply to this in public. The fire's too hot and I'm too small. Frogs get their gizzards cooked that way. I've seen it happen. What made him think I'd have pixie dust?

But the thought of Lynn Green standing at the gates of hell, catching bodies and minds and psyches as they fly by, is more than I can resist. Still, where do I begin? He's not really asking me for some kind of tidy answer. He knows better. He's just trying not to buckle under the weight of his holy mission and calling out to someone he thinks will understand.

Oh, Lynn. How do we wind up at the gates of hell anyway? It often feels so difficult--and on some days ridiculous--to keep believing that there's hope. We've been in this phase, after all, for nearly four hundred years. And rather than seeming to move in a healthier direction, it's apparent the blight has spread and is spreading. The forces of evil (if you will) move like a noxious fog over the face of the earth, enveloping more and more people and animals and trees. Much that is beautiful has been torn asunder and left for dead. And still we stand at the gates of hell, prepared to do battle as if we are not mortal, but rather some kind of mythological figure that did not name itself and cannot give up the fight because we never chose it in the first place.

Back in the covered wagon days, when I was going into prisons by court order to speak and counsel and serve, the men used to ask me, "Why are you doing this?" And I would say, "Anybody can do time. I'm just doing what I would hope someone would do for me, if I was locked up." But the fact is, I didn't know the answer. I was just being glib. Not that the answer I gave them wasn't true, but how did I come to know that? WHY did I want to do what I would hope someone would do for me, if the tables were turned?

For everyone of us standing at the gates of hell, there's a hundred thousand or more just schlepping along through life the best they can, thinking about remodeling the bathroom or trading in the car or planting a bigger (or a smaller) garden this year. And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with planting gardens or remodeling bathrooms? They earned it, didn't they? I mean, the poor (and the disenfranchised and the suffering and the wartorn) are always with us, aren't they? How does it get to be someone's holy mission to do something about it when there may be nothing to be done; that is, when there's no easy answer and it might all just get worse?

One thing's for sure: you don't volunteer for these gigs at the gates of hell. Nobody in their right minds by any popularly understood and accepted general standard would volunteer to put their heart on an altar on a daily basis and then set it on fire day after day while we miss many more than we're ever able to catch. We drop in exhaustion at the end of a trying day, only to arise and do it again, as if we had no perception of any other option. And when others say, "I couldn't do what you do," we think "I can't do it either. But I do..."

I look back over the different gates I've stood at--the prisons, the drug facilities, the juvenile lock-ups, the residential programs, the social service offices, the universities--and the faces come back to me like Botticelli paintings. The man who'd been in the hole for five years already in the dark side of a hill, leaning close to the bars and whispering "How do you learn to love again after you've forgotten what it feels like?" The bright-skinned Latino kid who wrote a play about the street and wouldn't discuss being forced to rob people at gunpoint to feed his mother's crack habit. The African-American kid who went back to detention for jumping a cop who was manhandling his friend in the courtyard of the facility--while the staff watched. The endless string of beautiful young women of color who admit with their eyes flat that they accept "dates" to pay the bills and buy their kids school supplies. The elderly African-American woman we found sitting alone in her dark, cold kitchen without food because she was too embarrassed to tell anyone her checks had been stopped and she didn't have anyone to help her. The college athlete forced to attend workouts at five in the morning, so he falls asleep in class, knowing no one really cares if he graduates. The Jamaican boy supporting six younger siblings who I saw stopped on the street by a police officer in broad daylight. I had worked with the boy in the past and just happened to be across the street to witness and then intervene as the officer proceeded to bounce the boy's head back into a brick wall every time he gave the "wrong" answer to a question. And where are they all now?

The schools are full of stories, full of pain. I used to tell "my" boys that learning to read is the most revolutionary act they could commit, but most of them did not imagine themselves to be revolutionaries. "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," they would say, a sentence I had first heard in the prisons two decades before.

For a while there at one point, a decade ago, I'd have ten-minute conversations with a boy who literally couldn't say three words without using some kind of sexual term. So--for as long as he could stand it--we would practice having casual conversation. About television. Or the weather. Or some other equally irrelevent topic. The goal, of course, being to talk without the "F-word" appearing even once as a noun or a verb or an adjective. And he eventually managed to get into a slot at a vocational rehab program. But I found him in the adult Department of Corrections data base the other day and had to stop looking up names because, after locating three of "my boys" grown up, but in jail, it was starting to get to me.

I used to give them candy as rewards for reading, nutritional guidelines be damned. Snickers bars were very popular (I wonder if there's a commercial in that somewhere?). And that was before I saw "Dangerous Minds." When I brought mini-chocolate bars to my college classrooom once last semester, I thought of the boy who shut the blinds and locked the door so that no one would know I was teaching him to read. I had found a 70-page book about car engines at the second grade reading level and when he finished it, he announced, "That's the longest book I've ever read!" and then demanded immediately: "Where's my Snickers?"

One year, I asked a roomful of sixteen-year-old minority summer school students why they thought so many kids drop out and they decided that not being able to read is one big reason. They agreed that it's embarrassing to admit by the time you're a teenager that you can't do the work because you can't read the words. So kids "act up" and get thrown out of class to avoid the humiliation of having their "secret" known.

When I suggested telling the teacher in the class, they assured me that when they tried that, they are often brushed off with an unapologetic, "That's not my problem. You should have learned that already."

"It's not your fault if you can't read," I told them, "It's the system's. Everyone of you wants this or you wouldn't be sitting here. The school board is supposed to see to it that you're provided a basic education. And reading's about as basic as you can get. It would have been great if you'd been able to get it before now, but you have a right to this and you need it, if you're going to be able to live a decent life. So if you don't know how to read, walk up to your teacher and say 'I need to read!' And if they won't help you, go to an administrator and say 'I need to read!' Until you find someone that will help you, no matter how many you have to approach." Did they? I don't know.

I remember doing an interview on the phone once for a piece of research I was doing on gang boys. I was on the phone so I wouldn't risk compromising the kid by knowing what he looked like, depending on what he decided to tell me. He was an articulate African-American boy--fifteen-years-old--and seemed both mature beyond his years and quite intelligent. When he told me that he had dropped out of school, I asked him why and he said, "Because all my friends dropped out."

"I didn't ask you about your friends," I countered. "I asked you why you dropped out."

This time, he considered my question for a moment before answering matter-of-factly, "I got tired of being treated like I was stupid." And I thought to myself, "I'll bet you did."

I mentored him just the tiniest bit and he went back to school, graduated, and got a good job at the university, where--as an employee--he could take courses for free, which he did. Then, he got married and bought a mobile home, so I thought he had beaten the odds, but the last I heard, he was back in the streets. I don't know what caused him to fall back, but I can only imagine how difficult it is to be a young African-American man or woman in a racist society.

The bottom line, Lynn, is that standing at the gates of hell is a head butt on a good day. And for every success story, there's gonna be twenty or thirty or more you're going to have to watch get past you. But keep in mind that somewhere up the road, there just might be another person who's successful where you haven't been. And, besides, you don't know what all you're really accomplishing. Have you ever seen a tiny sprig of green climbing up out of a crack in a sidewalk? Your biggest job, in the end, is to plant seeds, seeds that you may never see grow, but that will grow just the same.

Often, when I speak to a group or even a single person, I will think to myself, "Now what do I want to put in this person's mind, if this is my only shot ever?" On one such occasion, a boy in a facility I was working for was about to be arrested for murder. Everybody knew that if he got word of it, he would go over the wall. And he was hard to talk to anyway. But I had to say something. So, I walked up to him in the courtyard, stood there a minute and said simply, "No matter what, change is always an option. You know that, right?" He looked me dead in the eye--something I had not seen him do with anyone yet--and said, nodding, "Yes."

Sometimes, that has to be enough.

Let's Have Some Fun

If you're looking for something from me as to why I haven't been here for five weeks, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Of course, I'm busy. Of my 79 students, I've had in-depth sessions with a third of them. I started a Sociology Club on campus in the attempt to get the pot off the floor and back onto the stove with a fire under it. I'm kicking off a Sociological Film Series (for the same reason) and did my homework to host a series of sociological speakers for the spring (myself included, of course). I'm on campus five days a week and doing a new prep for a course I'm making up as I go along (which means lots and lots of reading). I'm already working on my courses for next semester (choosing books and such). And I've started learning Spanish in my spare moments so I'll be ready to visit Mexico in the spring. But it wasn't being busy that shut me up. And I wasn't sure what it was.

That is, I wasn't sure until I got a hint on Friday when I met a man named Pat button-holing people outside the library on campus. With the energy of a big city street hawker, the face of a grandad, and the attitude of a circus clown, he only let go of the couple he was talking to before me once he had taken me hostage. And you know it ain't easy to take me hostage. I have a way of either extricating myself or returning the favor. I latched on.

It turned out that Pat had once been a monk--for considerably more than a decade--and he lives somewhere off campus now and just putzes around getting into mischief. He serves as a liaison between two schools ("I represent each to the other, so I wind up talking to myself.") He quickly beguiled me (and when you're being beguiled by an Irishman, you're being beguiled) with tales of successfully picketing with migrants to win union concessions, organizing students into doing loving acts for no pay-off (my favorite!), and founding orphanages for boys in trouble. "I had fun doing this for a while," he would say, "and then I had fun doing that for a while..." And everything he does is fun. A lot of it.

I found myself pausing ruefully to admit that I had begun to see everything I was doing as work. And I was reaching a point that I didn't like any of it any more.

"You gotta have fun!" he bubbled (the man bubbles, I tell you--it crossed my mind when he first captured me that, angel or not, he must be manic or something, but after awhile, I no longer cared--if that's manic, I need me some). By the time he let me go, some thirty or forty minutes later, I felt different.

And here I am. I've read. I've watched videos (on capitalism, for classes). I've studied Spanish. I've sniffed the internet for a position at a new school next year (oh, yeah! I wanna do this again!) And here I am. Swilling coffee so late, it's probably gonna keep me up all night long. But here just the same. Writing. Re-connecting. Dancing, as it were. Having some fuckin' fun. Yes, indeedy.

See, the thing is: when I came to this new campus, I was under the impression that I had to prove something to somebody. That I was somehow inadequate to the task. That I had to make up for lost time. That I had to "figure it all out." Yesterday. And it was not fun.

Then, a few students that I wouldn't have liked at any school showed up in one of my classes and since I was busy trying to "figure it all out," I thought I had to "reach" them. I know damned well you can't teach a pig to sing. But I thought I had to. Somehow. What a bummer. And so unnecessary.

Anyway, the students won for a while. I let them steal my joy. I mean, I've seen these self-righteous, little over-incomed/super-entitled/madras-wearing lacrosse players before. But normally, I just tune 'em out. That is to say, normally, I manage to tune them out. This time, they were so in-my-face, so bitter, and so unapologetically closed-minded, that I let them become every establishment authority figure I had ever been cowed by. (I know, I know. It doesn't seem as if I'd be easily cowed. And I'm not. I've faced down some real scary people. But that was always fighting for somebody else. When it came to fighting for myself, I didn't always--or even necessarily usually--have what it took.)

I knew I had the ultimate upper hand. Eventually, the ring-leader humbled himself to the point of admitting that he was willing to "do whatever it takes" to pass the class and even mentioned, by way of explanation, that he doesn't agree with the things I say, so he blocks out what he needs to be learning. I told him I could work with that, but it didn't make me feel any better.

Then, that afternoon, walking across the campus, which is beautiful, wearing my red and black argyle sweater in the sunshine, it occurred to me. Of course, they buck. I'm flying in the face of everything they think their future is founded on. And they could be right. They've never been forced to really consider this kind of stuff before, let alone forced to be graded on whether or not they got it, and here they are. If I think I'm miserable, just imagine how they feel, I thought.

Then, I remembered the juvenile delinquents I used to work with down in Miami and the way I used to train others to work with them. "Watch their feet," I used to say. "They'll grumble and mumble and call you names, but in the end, if they head generally--however slowly--in the direction you've indicated, then let 'em grouse. What difference does it make? They have to save face. They're giving up their power. You're winning, so can't you afford to let the silliness slide?"

All I have to do, I thought, walking toward the library in the sunshine, is just lighten up on the rein a little and ride the bull the way I know how. And then Pat reached out and grabbed my hand and said, "Hi, how are you today? I hope you're having a wonderful day." And by the time we parted, I was. And I have been all week-end. And I expect to be tomorrow. And I can hardly wait until Thanksgiving when I have a whole nine days to call my own. You better look out. I'm back. ;^)

Fighting For Our Lives

Sometimes, I feel as if we're all headed for hell in a handbasket. Sometimes, I don't see the point of trying anymore. I look around at the pain and the confusion and the alienation and I start to wonder if life on earth is just going to become impossible at some point, given those who seem to have the power to define and the fact that the rest of us don't act as if we have the foggiest clue what to do about it.

I read the news and I feel like crawling under the bed. I look at the lives of the people I know and I wonder if any of them are ever--really--happy. I watch a woman hitting a child across the car seat from her, not once, or in one flurry of slaps, but over and over and over and over--sequence after sequence--as she steers her car around the corner in heavy traffic, oblivious that her violence is being observed by a total stranger in the car creeping along behind her. And I wonder what will become of that child and how it will someday use what it is learning. I think about my mother struggling with Alzheimer's. And all the folks who used to make good money, but now can't find a job. And I think about the old folks and mentally ill who can't afford the medication they need to live a decent life--or even live at all.

Even when I teach--and maybe especially when I teach--I'm increasingly, incredibly aware of the human condition. I walk into a classroom and look at thirty or fifty or one hundred and fifty expressionless faces, at the ready, and wonder if one of them is the one who will shoot me (as an anonymous student once threatened to do on the telephone in the middle of the night) or try to cause me some kind of trouble because they don't like what I say or they don't want to know it. I wonder if one of them will kill themselves on my watch--without ever telling me that they're considering it. I wonder how many are struggling with drugs or just found out they're pregnant or will learn tomorrow that they've acquired a disease for which there is no known cure. I wonder which of the women got beaten up by her "boyfriend" last night, which of the men is working two jobs on top of going to school in an attempt to keep his father and mother from hitting the wall now that they're both ill. I wonder which of them will lose their scholarship this semester and be relegated back to the ranks of those who will not earn enough to survive. I wonder which of them live their every moment in gut-gripping anxiety because if they don't get all A's (no matter what), they'll incur the rage of a father who holds not only the purse-strings, but their sense of self-worth, in his authoritarian hands. I've long since learned that every one of them has a story. Every one of them, no matter what they look like, have things going on in their lives--or have had or will shortly--that will mark them as humans in a difficult world.

Sometimes, they wait to see me one after the other outside my office. Sometimes, they approach me after class (starting on the first day of the semester), saying, "You seem like someone I can talk to." Sometimes they call me so I can't see their face. Sometimes, they don't even want to admit what the problem is, so they'll approach me with another problem or situation or concern.

"I'm not sure I can pass your class," he might say, looking worried. "I'm used to teachers going through the book page by page, talking about it. I don't know if I'm taking the right notes." But in truth, it may be that he doesn't read well. Or write well. And he has to pass the class to play his sport at the school to which he wants to go. Which is--to his mind--the only way he's going to get out of the abject poverty in which he was raised. And he's six foot four and a man and he can't just admit how weak his skills are off the court or how frightened he is that he's going to be stuck in the ghetto. And I can't ask because it might not be true or he might not tell me, but if it is true and he won't tell me (for fear I'll rat him out), then the game is over before it's begun. And he'll disappear mid-semester and I'll have lost him. Forever.

I look at the woman who's come back to school, who's shaking in her boots because she's twenty or even thirty years older than the others, embarrassed at her fear, embarrassed at not having done it already, unsure she can do it, caught in a new employment market that is going to push her out if she doesn't have the credential. I look at the kid with the dream and no food money. I look at the one who's taken the class three times already in an attempt to make the A that's necessary to get him into the course of study he's longed to enter since he was fifteen. I look at the one who's translating everything I say into some other language in her head, determined to make it because her degree from somewhere else isn't meaningful here, even with years of experience.

I listen to a woman tell me off because she isn't doing well in the course and it's months before she admits that her emotions are really about her fear on a new and more professional job and her attempts to be a good mommy while her husband does his year in jail. I look at the couple who's breaking up because she's already successfully made the shift to the university and he's still struggling with D's at the community college, not wanting to face that both his college career and his relationship are probably hopeless. And I watch the bright, but odd ones, collecting the giggles of their classmates, pretending not to notice and not able, in any case, to be any different than they are.

Needless to say, with my rather focused interest in and understanding of racial issues, I'm especially sensitive to the struggles of my students of color. The other day, for example, I looked out over my classroom at a group I had only seen four times so far, and I was suddenly hyper-conscious that fully six or so out of the 28 students were African-American males taking a summer sociology course and on their way to another school in the fall to play a sport. At the college level, at least at community colleges and state schools (the only ones with which I'm familiar), there are always a few athletes--male or female--in the class. At one point, I spent four years teaching at FSU where you knew the male athletes because, no matter what their sport, they filled the doorway. But to have half dozen in more or less the same circumstance suddenly reminded me (once more) of why I do what I do in the way that I do it.

Almost instantly, in spite of the fact that my lecture of the day was on research methods (not one of my spicier offerings), I started finding ways to reach out to them. You can't be sure you'll ever see a student again (regardless of where you are in the semester). In fact, I often operate when I speak, in school or otherwise, out of the idea that, if I never see these people again, what would I have wanted to say to them? And I started fighting for their very lives.

The fact is that I don't even remember now what all I managed to work into the lecture. And it was appropo to all of the students anyway--more or less. And I worked hard not to look overly at the young men in question when pouring out my heart, telling what I know about life, using how sociological research captures causal chains to offer them tools for better understanding that many of their problems are not so much personal as social. Encouraging and empowering them to go another step, to hang in there, to recognize that the strength that brought them this far can take them all the way, I was terribly aware of what I was doing. But you rarely get a signal from them--not when it's going on.

Then, on the way out of the class, one of the young men to whom I'd been particularly speaking walked past me casually, handing me a folded piece of paper and proceeding out the door. I knew what it was. I've gotten many such notes through the years.

"I really enjoy this course," it read, "and I wanted you to know that the way you teach highly encourages me to be here. You kinda got me thinking of switching my major to becoming a sociologist. Thanks for being a great instructor. You are very appreciated. Real talk, you're the best I ever had."

And then I knew I had been heard. Again.

See, it's not about me. It's about them. All the ones who need to know it's possible, who need to believe there's hope. They can take that little speech, those words of truth, and parlay them into a leap to the sun. I've seen it happen over and over. It amazes me every time. That I get to participate in their process. That I get to show them how to stretch their bow. That I get to give them sustenance, sometimes before they even know they're hungry.

European-American youth who may have always known they're going to do this and be that and have those things that make them what they've always known they'd be--they have problems, too. And I work with them one on one endlessly, when they need me, but they often have other support mechanisms, as well. Not always, but often. And they have the social benefits of their racial privilege. Still, even they have the capacity to surprise me.

Yesterday, as I mulled over the note I had received the day before, I got an email from a former student, a young European-American man who was raised in a fine home in a particularly beautiful and wealthy setting, the son of a powerful father, with basically nowhere to go but up. Very bright, he spoke almost not at all, but he came within three points of earning all the possible points in the course, and then asked me politely at the end if he might contact me by email sometime. I assured him that he could. And here it finally was.

"I just wanted you to know," he wrote,"that what I learned from you touched me deeply, and you may have taken me one step closer to finding out what I want to do with my life. I'm not sure, but I think I may want to write or somehow communicate on as large a scale as possible--always on my subject of choice: institutional injustice, that of our country in particular...After one of your classes when you were lecturing about the state of affairs in this country...I went down to my car, started processing that information with my life experiences and cried. I wasn't even really sure why...I have always had to do what I have to do and have rarely done what I wanted to do. I have just put my philosophies and creativity on hold...[Y]our class brought a piece of me out and I thank you..."

So, there it is--Black or White. I am socially reproducing myself as a conscious European-American. I am--to the extent I am capable--being a bridge of hope across which people of color can walk to their next destination. And when the world is too much with me, I am, always, saved by the students I'm trying to save. And that's the way it works, I guess, because, in the end, maybe we're all just fighting for our lives.

Racism = Prejudice + Power

My unapologetic intention when I teach is to open students' minds to ideas they may not have previously considered. If this sounds like something scary, keep in mind that the whole process of socialization--from birth--is exactly and nothing more than this. We're not born "gendered," for example; the attempt is made to carefully and with great intent turn us into "little girls" and "little boys"--for life. Similarly, one of the perfectly understandable difficulties with our legislative system is that virtually all of those who make it to Washington were born rich and have really no clue in Hell what the rest of us--the vast majority of U.S. citizens--are dealing with.

Anyway, by the time most young people get to college, they've had at least 18 years of non-stop exposure to the "party line." By this, I don't mean necessarily a particular political view, although that can certainly be part of it. What I mean is that this nation was founded on principles that are very, very intrinsic to its nature and pretty much consistent to the present. And youth being raised up under these principles and impressed with their veracity come to see them as the only way to think. This is what many people call a "world view." Every society has one.

Now, if the principles in question were the principles we hear touted all the time when people are running for office or selling a war--principles such as truth, peace, and freedom--there wouldn't be a problem. And I'd probably be somewhere rocking on a porch. But from the inception of this nation, we have talked out one side of our national mouth and barked orders out of the other without seeming to recognize or care that those to whom we are barking the orders are not confused about our motives one iota.

We rave about truth while telling huge and malicious lies and then simply shrug when confronted with reality. We smarm about freedom and have the hands-down worst reputation of all time for forcing our will on anyone who will stand still for it and literally millions who have fought us to the death (such as the Native Americans)--allies and enemies alike. And we pontificate sanctimoniously about peace while having built and maintained our nation on the back of a military machine that began with men shooting other men in the back from behind trees and has now become a force that will go down in history with the most infamous and misguided despotic societies that ever existed.

So it is that people who have been raised under this system have learned to say that they believe in one thing, and yet actually live their lives out very pointedly in directions that manifest something totally different. Such as, on one hand, screeching "just say no to drugs" at the top of our lungs, while popping every imaginable substance--prescription, street, or otherwise--at every imaginable opportunity. Whether it's crack, valium, Jack Daniels, or Starbucks, we espouse one theory and live another.

Similarly, people in the United States, and most particularly European-Americans, spout a supposed belief in "equality," whatever we think that is, while being unconscionably comfortable with the greatest gaps (between rich and poor, between White and Black) of any industrialized nation of the world. And we are so committed to this idealized belief in equality--as opposed to the actual practice of it--that people who look like me purport to be stunned when presented with the idea that the equal treatment does not, in fact, exist, however well documented this reality may be.

One way to protest or mask the reality of racial oppression and its ramifications is to use the word "racism" to mean any prejudicial attitude by anyone of any "race" anywhere who feels superior in any way to someone of a different "race." That way, a European-American can point at an African-American who has buckled under his or her grief, frustration, and discouragment, finally becoming filled with bitterness and maybe even hatred toward the White establishment and those it privileges--and call that person of color a "racist." Which, in turn, allows White folks to declare, "See--anyone can be a racist."

The reason this doesn't hold for me is that, to start with, as I mentioned before (see "'Black.White.' Part Two or Keep My Name Out Your Mouth," March 4th), Europeans expressly constructed the very concept of "race" in the first place. And they didn't do it to make it easier to identify someone in a crowd either. They did it to create a hierarchy wherein people that look like me would automatically get the most of the best and the least of the worst--primarily by stealing from everybody else in one way or the other--while whoever was left got what they could, if anything. This was done for the purpose of making a very specific group of Europeans extremely rich. And White-controlled science, White-controlled law, and White-controlled religion worked together to legitimate this construct by announcing in no uncertain terms that White folks are superior to all other peoples on the face of the earth.

In other words, the very social construction of "race" itself was the act of White oppressors for the purpose of exploiting and dominating people of color. Having gone that far, some Europeans took their grandiose new status and proceeded to immigrate to North America, dragging with them millions of Africans, who they brutally and violently forced to build a new nation from the ground up for the benefit of its White citizens. It goes without saying, of course, that all of this new nation's social institutions, then, were originally established and have been continuously maintained by those with the power to define the culture--White people and those they allow into the inner circle.

This has not changed to date. We no longer drink at separate water fountains, it's true. But African-Americans, as a rule and across the board, because they don't have the power to do anything about it, are still paid less than White folks, own less than White folks, are more likely to be unemployed than White folks, are more likely to go to jail than White folks, etc., etc., ad nauseum. And most White folks are convinced that this is because people of color are, in fact, inferior. Let me repeat that: most White folks, yes, most White folks believe that people of color are, in fact, inferior. Even as they say, "I don't see color. I just see everyone as a human being," by which they mean, they don't intend to acknowledge all the studies showing how exploited and dominated people of color still are in the United States because the White speaker has already decided that Black people's problems are the result of Black people's inferiority. "Some of my best friends are Black," they will say, while discounting what African-Americans themselves say about the quality of their lives in the good old U.S. of A.

This rampant perception that people of color are inferior creates such a mindset that it's actually part of our national world view. We've taught ourselves to believe it for so long that we now think it's the natural truth. And to make matters worse, we've taught people of color to believe it, as well, in the face of overwhelming documentation to the contrary. Why do you think we dare not treat "African-American history" as a regular part of the history curriculum in this country rather than just breaking out Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech once a year in February? If people of color understood clearly who they are and what has been done to them, they would have long since burned this country down. And if White people were taught the truth of this nation's history and their own participation in and benefit from practices of White power and privilege, it would humble them so much that they might not recover.

Consequently, I (and I am not alone here) don't believe that it's possible for a person of color to be a racist. A Black person can be prejudiced against members of other groups, can be mean-spirited, can be cruel, can be hateful, can even be dangerous to members of other groups, but they have never had the power in the United States to define the nature of their own lives and therefore, to me, they're just being prejudicial, mean-spirited, cruel, hateful, and dangerous. The erroneous belief in White superiority and the inferiority of all others is directly responsible for the racist oppression that is entrenched and lethal in its daily application to the lives of people of color in this country today. It's no wonder African-Americans don't like White people. And since White people chose to construct the category of "race" in the first place specifically to gain from the denigration and destruction of other's lives, only White people, in my opinion, then, can be "racist."

You Want To Destroy A Black Person?

"You've heard the joke," she said to me after wiping the tears from her cheeks. "If you want to destroy a Black person, just leave him in a room with another Black person."

I hadn't heard that particular "joke," but I have often heard an African-American person speak of crabs in a barrel and how when one has almost broken free, the others will pull it back inside.

She had gotten the second highest grade in the class--what ended up amounting to even more than a perfect score once the extra credit points were added in--and then she admitted it when someone in the class cracked a joke about who it could be.

When a person has been out of school for a while and comes back, they very often find that suddenly (and somewhat unexpectedly) they are at the top of their academic game. No matter how well they did--or did not do--before, now, they fairly dazzle themselves with their own performance. It's quite a moment, really. I know, because I had the experience. One minute, I was paralyzed with terror over the whole prospect of "going back to school," my best friend holding my shaking hand and pledging to help me in any way I needed her to so that I could make it. And the next minute, I was already in grad school, having cleared my Bachelor's degree in a calendar year! Who knew?

Anyway, it's very exciting. And reassuring. Damn! Here I thought maybe I was too dumb to walk and chew gum simultaneously and, then, in what felt like a heartbeat, I realized that I hadn't begun to understand what was just waiting patiently to be unleashed. It's like the sun coming up and suddenly, all those shadows disappear and we're dancing for sheer joy. And it most definitely is not about anything or anybody but us.

So we might blurt out in a moment of celebration, "I'm the one! I killed the curve! Is that the bomb or what?" Not unlike how we might feel if our kid wins a race or our mutt dog does a particularly clever stunt we didn't teach it. We're so amazed ourselves that we can't immediately conceive of it having anything to do with effort or even ego. We're simply delighted.

But drawing this type of attention, of course, is like going out in hunting season wearing a deer suit, joy notwithstanding. It'll only ever happen to an individual once, I assure you.

In this case, however, the Curve-Killer was an African-American and the one she apparently most offended was, as well. Thus, the telling of the "joke." And the beginning, for me, of a week of thinking about it. Because even though this exact same thing could have happened to any returning student--male or female, Black or White, rich or poor--when it happened to this particular student, it became about "race." That's how it is in the United States: one way or the other, if you're African-American, everything is about race.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that it's perceived as being about race. I'm saying it's about race. Because White people can have a whole list of other characteristics as individuals, but African-Americans are first, foremost, and even with each other, primarily "Black." That's the way the European-American power structure set it up back in the 1700's to reduce Africans to one big amorphous body of labor. Cut them off from their respective traditions, from their languages and their religions, from their names and their peoples, and eventually even from each other. So that two hundred years later, two students of color--both bright, both unquestionably capable of being anything they have an opportunity to be--will find themselves unable to be allies. Now, whose best interest is that in?